Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Focus on Cuba
Dissident Blogger Orlando Luis
Pardo Lazo Comes to Brown
Th e C e n t e r f o r L at in
Am e r i c a n a n d
C a r i b b e an S t ud i e s
B r o w n U n i ve r s i t y
Focus on Cuba 2012-13 No. 3
ISSUE 3– UPDATED!
One of the first Tweets that
Cuba’s Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
published after his arrival in the
U.S. on March 5 was, “La noche es
hermosa en todas partes. Miami
luce como un milagro.”
Over the past few days, his nearly
6,000 followers have been treated
to his first impressions of this
‘miracle’ and New York City, and
they will no doubt hear about
Pardo Lazo’s visit to Brown later
this semester.
A blogger, photographer and
political activist, Pardo Lazo is the
author of the blogs Lunes de PostRevolución and Boring Home
Utopics and has published five
books of short stories: Collabe
Karaoke (2001), Empezar de
cero (2001), Ipatrías (2005), Mi
nombre es William Saroyan
(2006) and Boring Home
(2009).
He has contributed to many
literary projects and his
photographs have been
featured in publications in
Cuba and Brazil. He also has
won awards such as the Pinos
Nuevos Prize (2000), Luis
Felipe Rodríguez Prize (2004),
Calendario Prize (2005) and La
Gaceta de Cuba Award (2005).
Susan Eckstein on the New Cuba and the
Cuban Diaspora
Susan Eckstein, Professor of Sociology
and International Relations at Boston
University and former President of
LASA, will offer a talk on March 14
entitled “The New Cuba and the Impact
of the Cuban Diaspora in Transforming
Their Homeland.” She provided us with
the following synopsis of her talk:
For the first thirty years of Castro’s rule the
government created a “wall” between Cubans
who emigrated and those who stayed loyal to
the revolution, and Cubans in the diaspora
supported an embargo of Cuba on both the
state-to-state and people-to-people level as
impermeable as possible, in hopes of thereby
bringing Castro’s regime to heel. But after
Soviet aid and trade ended, with the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba was
forced to reintegrate into the capitalist world
economy. Needing hard currency, the
government transformed the diaspora into a
dollar generating strategy, by facilitating
and tacitly encouraging remittance-sending.
Ordinary Cubans themselves wanted
remittances to finance a lifestyle they could
not otherwise afford, and the “new Cubans”
who emigrated left committed to help family
they left behind. Despite the new state and
societal shared interests in remittances, the
government increasingly appropriated
remittances at recipients’ expense. In my
presentation I will document how and why
the government encouraged remittancesending, tensions between its interests in
remittances and those of recipients, and
contradictions inherent in the hard currency
accumulation strategy that are transforming
socialism as Cubans knew it.
Pardo Lazo will speak at 12 p.m. on
April 2 in Joukowsky Forum at the
Watson Institute.
Eckstein will speak on March 14 at 5
p.m. in McKinney Conference Room.